New Blizzard Customer Service Directive?

#0 - June 11, 2010, 11:01 p.m.

Recently my account was compromised due to the vulnerability in the Flash player that Blizzard uses in all of its online features. I came home Wednesday night to find all my gold, and everything that could be sold for gold in my bank / bags / on my character gone. At first I was confused for the person who took my items and gold had left all of my account information untouched. My password and Battle.net e-mail remained the same, and I was able to log in without issue. "No matter its quite obvious whats gone on here, and the good ol' Blizzard GMs should be able to restore my valuable items in a jiffy" I figured. So I wrote up my ticket explaining the problem, and waited patiently for the GM response.

About 5 hours pass, the duration of which I have remained online but alt-tabbed to do something other than stare at my itemless character, and there is still no word from Blizzard. "Must be a busy night for them, I'll just leave my ticket open and im sure I will have some correspondence from the awesome Blizzard GMs" I told myself as I went to bed.

I woke up in the morning and logged on before heading off to work to discover my ticket had been closed and I had received some in game mail from the Blizzard Customer service department. "Ahh they've done it again, those fine GMs over at Blizzard have restored my items even faster than I could have imagined" I said to myself as I skipped off to the nearest mailbox. Upon reaching the mailbox I was confused upon discovering only a single message from the customer service department in my mailbox, a message that read something along the lines of:

Q u o t e:
Greetings! We've recieved your ticket and have forwarded yout issue to the restoration specialists. Fortunately for you we have been able to decrease the wait time involved in these issues to around 10 days! But fret not if you wait longer than 10 days as some times that does happen.

Thanks for paying to play this game, too bad you won't be able to do that over the next 10 days because your character has no items.

"Surely this must be a joke" I said to myself as I tabbed to check my e-mail, hoping to discover a more in depth description of how Blizzard planned on fixing this problem. Low and behold, my mailbox was empty, except for an e-mail telling me my password has been reset due to the ticket I had put in (something that tells me Blizzard musn't read these tickets because I specifically said that I had reset my password / updated Flash already, why it had to be reset again is beyond me) there was absolutely no other correspondence from Blizzard.

A bit miffed that my issue had most likely not even been looked at by the "restoration specialist" yet, I submitted another ticket Thursday afternoon asking if I could speak to someone in person regarding my issue. But my ticket remained open with zero response for the duration of Thursday night, and well into this afternoon.

-I have scanned my computer for viruses and found nothing.
-None of my other personal information was compromised, my Paypal, online banking, and various forum / website accounts all remain un-touched. My World of Warcraft account was the only thing compromised.
-Blizzard announces there is a vulnerability in the current version of Flash player, an application they use on the Forums / Armory, two things which I logged in and out of frequently before my account was compromised.
-Upon logging in I still had an in-game mail from Blizzard thanking me for attaching an authenticator to my account, something I never did. I am assuming this was done to stop me from logging in while the hackers were stealing my items.
-The hackers forgot to remove the character they sent all of my items to from my friends list (character is still on my friends list).

I mean, I don't see how there can be any debate at all in regards to what occurred here. I fell victim to the vulnerability in Flash, and now I must pay for it by not being able to play my account for 10 days? Are you serious?

What happened to the days when GMs actually interacted with players instead of just sending e-mails / in-game mails. This has happened to me twice in the past during The Burning Crusade, and both times I was put in touch with a GM after a couple of hours of having my ticket open, was immediately referred to the restoration specialist after talking to the GM, and then had my items restored shortly after. What happened to that Blizzard? Why all of a sudden does it go from taking 1 day to restore my items to taking more than a week?

The way I see it right now is that I am paying to play a game that I cannot play. Not because I did something wrong, but instead because of a vulnerability in an application the developers use. Am I, as well as players with similar issues do to the Flash vulnerability going to be reimbursed for these 10 days? How much longer will it take you to restore our items? Some correspondence from anyone employed by Blizzard in any form other than in-game mail would be greatly appreciated.

Malkorix

#30 - June 12, 2010, 2:35 a.m.

Q u o t e:
I mean, I don't see how there can be any debate at all in regards to what occurred here. I fell victim to the vulnerability in Flash, and now I must pay for it by not being able to play my account for 10 days? Are you serious?

Actually, if you found no trace of the compromise, the likeliest explanation would be that your account was compromised by a phishing attempt, not the Flash vulnerability.

I am sorry if you found this situation frustrating at all. We're doing our utmost to reach all of our players as soon as we possibly can. While I'm happy to hear that you've taken steps to secure your system, perhaps the security advice we've posted in our sticky will be of some service:

Account Hacked? Security Issue? Look Here!
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=24702231244&sid=1

It is also wise to leave your World of Warcraft client open with gibberish in the input fields while running your spyware scans - that can help catch some of the sneakier keyloggers. Current restoration wait times are indeed running at about a week and a half. Our staff will be happy to address your case as soon as your turn in the queue comes up, and we appreciate your patience in the meantime.

Malkorix

#32 - June 12, 2010, 2:57 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Thanks for your response Malkorix, if you wouldnt mind answering one question though. Why exactly is the wait time so long? I can't imagine the Flash vulnerability having that large an impact on the queue times.

You're welcome!

While I'm not in a position to discuss the specifics, the vulnerability in certain applications was actually relatively short lived, and is not responsible for the current wait times. We merely issued the announcement to let our players know of a potential risk so that they can protect themselves, and it's probably best not to make too much of it. In reality, there are many methods of account compromise, and currently, all too many of them are related to social engineering. Hence the phishing emails, in-game whispers, and the like that are going around. After all, no amount of malware protection is of any help at all, if you are tricked into giving away your account name and password =(.

The queue times are high because there are a lot of incoming requests of all sorts. Compromise investigations in particular are quite time consuming and exacting. Regrettably, there is no magic button that we can push to restore an account, and each one needs to be investigated individually. Still, we realize how devastating a compromise can be, and while no restoration is ever guaranteed, we strive to help our players make as complete a recovery as possible.

Malkorix

#35 - June 12, 2010, 3:02 a.m.

Q u o t e:

Not really sure why you even have to ask that question. Not only is it the flash problem but you have 1000's of people returning to the game, people falling for phishing scams, people getting keyloggers and those are just for compromised accounts. For the initial wait you have the tickets put in for GM jokes(just check WoWbash), for the ones of "a guy called me a poopy head, plus hundreds of other non GM questions or complaints that should never have been submitted.

In short it's really not that hard to understand why the queue is so long.

If one of our players feels that their concern is important enough to take the time to submit a petition about, then we feel that it's important enough to address. There are fewer 'fluff' petitions than one would imagine, really.